The Brooklyn Rail

For his new exhibition at David Zwirner, first in New York then in Los Angeles, Luc Tuymans wanted to confront a challenge: how can a painter address the fact that we are now all used to experiencing backlit frames? With our phones, our computers, we see the light coming from the back of an object we hold, rather than seeing it coming from behind us and touching the reality we are looking at. This question is a pictorial one: it speaks to the relation between painting and the world of images; it is also an existential one, as it speaks to the very nature of our rapport with the world that surrounds us. The history of painting, particularly Flemish painting—let us think of Jan Van Eyck, the founder—is consistently indebted to a way of looking with a light coming from elsewhere, not from the object—not even mentioning the debate on natural lighting versus artificial. Luc Tuymans aims for an idealist, almost utopian goal: to find, within painting, the resolution to the current neutralization of the art of looking.

It is fascinating to see artists confronting their times in deep fashions: it shows, if need be, that we do not belong to a post-history in which everything has been done, and where we can hardly have a grasp of the flux of the present. Being a great artist means holding onto the desire to be part of history and twist it, even slightly. Luc Tuymans has always addressed the events—at times dark—of recent history. With this exhibition, he goes deeper into the grain of the present: What happens to art when we do not know how to look anymore—when our gaze has become numb because of the amount of light and color we ingest all the time? Can painting be an antidote? This line of questioning is very clearly embedded within the fabric of art, but, as always with Luc Tuymans, it ties in with deep existential matters.

This shows a deep belief in the power of art to still change the world. But in order to achieve this goal, one needs to make very strategic, clever moves. The purpose is to still make looking possible, no less. So the artist has to pay attention to every detail. First move: the palette. Luc Tuymans is famous for his relatively dim, soft colors. In this exhibition, bright green, turquoise blue, powerful red, lapis-lazuli blue, and orange have a lasting impact on the eye. The colors of the screen are nothing compared to his: facing the poison of erasure in the art of looking, one needs to use a powerful antidote.

We are used to looking at images online—the screen of Instagram—that are always different, new, spectacular. Contrary to some of his other projects and exhibitions in which he decided to stick with one series of images coming from one source, Luc Tuymans embraces variety. The colors vary, the scales vary, and the paintings that compose the exhibition are all different: they range from images of human beings, to an object that seems hard to define, to an apparent abstraction that is in fact a detail blown-up, to a mask, to a scene of combat. The spectacle of the backlit reality is confronted to the extreme variety of the events that can find their way into painting. Luc Tuymans’s confrontation is always lateral: even when he seems to be direct, it is in fact lateral. The source images are many, and the ways paint is applied seem to differ the one from the other: from an apparently realistic depiction of an older man to the seemingly gestural covering of a blue surface, there seems to be nothing similar. The sources of the images are very different, and nothing is a given fact: what comes across as images of human beings are actually depictions of figurines. They are not alive, they are mere imitations of presences: and yet, the power of painting makes us wonder about the status of the person, of the origin, of life. Are we all alive?

An exhibition of Luc Tuymans is always a bit of a riddle. Even the title, “The Fruit Basket”: what does it mean? It is as if every painting, with its title, is a fragment from a riddle that the viewer has to decipher for themselves. This exhibition is reminiscent of Umberto Eco: in 1973, having returned from the United States, he published a collection of essays and called it Travels in Hyperreality. He designated the fact that the very notion of reality was challenged and that, when travelling in this space, one was to recognize that the stability we once thought to govern our lives was an illusion. And then, from having recognized that, we could look back and find our ground. This exhibition is the same: Luc Tuymans too took a travel in Hyperreality, and he brought us with him. A number of the images—the teenager playing sports, the father and the son, the older man holding a football, the family—are clichés: with his work, he shows the uncanny of them.

One of the paintings may come across as an emblem for the exhibition: titled Hollow, it depicts a latex mask. When we look at it, it seems to disappear, to fade away, and then one sees it again and it comes across fully formed, almost a totem-like figure. What is hollow may be filled by us. It is Luc Tuymans’s statement on the art of painting: this way of experiencing a physical reality, of seeing it morph and change as we look, while it remains the same object in front of us—that is the power of the physical, and the might of the gaze. A latex mask can become a mythical object, almost a mirror for us to look at ourselves looking. Such a mise-en-abyme comes across as the key to the riddle: looking, as painting, is an exercise that requires a lot of work, and consciousness. The artist’s mandate is to invite us to take that path, to live in a greater knowledge, and, perhaps, better. The “fruit basket” could be a nature morte, the French for still life: and yet it lives. This cornucopia of images and colors is all assumed under this relatively bland title. To get what it is all about, you have to see—and look.